Bad news, good news, little more bad news that kinda turned into okay news and worse news and "morals of the story" and shit...

I'm gittin' so confuuuused here.

Sunday night the heater came on and it sounded weird, so I told Eric he should go ask his Boss about getting some more fuel for it.
He, of course, did not.
(He NEVER, EVER, EVER listens to me...)
Monday morning... no heat.
Pft.

So, I take cash out to him in the milking parlor for fuel before I go to work.

Meanwhile, when I first got up and left the bedroom, I saw this cat... not so usual around here. I have about 90 of the fuckin' things, but this one was kinda cool.

It was Dale.
I haven't seen him since September.

Last time I saw that dipwad, I was on a horse and he was in a field I was riding in across the road. I kinda knew he wouldn't sit for riding with me, so I told him I'd get him on the way back. You know, just in case he was too retarded to find his way back across the road...
And yeah... you can roll yer eyes at that, but... he was too retarded... til now.

Since Tyler (the Jack Russell) came out first, all I saw was a flash of mostly white tail as he (Dale) flew down the stairs and out the door.
I come on down, put Tyler on his outside (really long, in fact it's a horse lungeline) leash to pee, grabbed a flashlight (it was still dark) and followed the white streak over to between the barns to see if it was, in fact, Dale.

Yep.
It's him.
Stupid cat... *grin*

He pretended not to know me and was kinda freaked out, so I let him be.
Besides, I hadda go to work.

Well, Mr. Boss wasn't there.
So, Mrs. Boss decides to hell with him and his way of doing things, she was gonna bring the tractor and spreader right on through the barn to make it "easier".

Yeah.
Easier.
Um-hum.
I suppose that's why I didn't leave til 3pm.
'Cause it was "easier"... *giggle*

There's a reason why Mr. Boss doesn't do that.
And, that's because he doesn't wanna spend half the day rebuilding the fuckin' BARN after the spreader rips shit offa the walls!
*God he'p me*

Now, see... I'm usually done by around 11, or so, depending on how long I fuck around, playing fetch with the dogs or whatever. It's on me and that's fine.
But, not leaving til 3pm?
Not so fine, but... in another way, it was kinda cool that I got to "share" this with Mrs. Boss because I normally spend all my time with Mr. Boss and this gave me a chance to "bond", as it were, with her... by covering her ass.

(And, for the record, it's not really that much easier to get rid of the shit with the spreader inside the barn. True, I don't hafta make 97 trips back and forth with the wheeled bucket, but ya do hafta to fling the shit about 6 feet in the air to clear the side of the spreader and be able to reach it in the first place because it's kinda far from all but about two of the stalls at a time... but ANYway...)

She backed it into the first barn.
No problem there, because that's where it goes at night anyway, so it fits fine.
Get to the "big" barn and here we go.

There's a huge bale of hay that's always in there, on the floor, in between two stall doors. Usually, it's right up against the wall, but this one, the one that's in there now, is out a coupla inches.
Mrs. Boss sees that when she's driving in and tries not to hit it, which she didn't,
She did, however, hit the shit on the other side which wasn't something easy to fix, like a bale of hay... oh nooooo.

They have these horseshoes that're welded together to form hooks that're nailed to the wall outside of each stall. They're to hang leadlines on.
There are also doorstops at the bottom of each stall door to keep the doors from being able to be pushed out at the bottom.

Well, the spreader tire caught a horseshoe hook and bent it nearly in half and ran over one of the doorstops and broke it.
Those things are bolted to the wall.
Major league hardware there.

So, as she's bringing the spreader thru, she sees that it's rubbing the stall doors and drawing them closed a little, but doesn't realize she's tearin' up the other stuff til she gets off the tractor.

"oh shit...."

Me?
I'm just kinda standin' there, leaning on the fork, watching...
Not my place to correct a woman... don't know how, ain't got that mojo, plus, usually HORSEwomen are fuckin' nuttier than "regular" ones, so I'm goin' with the better part of valor and keepin' my mouth shut.
(There's a first time for everything... shaddap.)
Besides, I have yet to come across a situation like that where I can't fix what somebody else (or I) fucked up.

You can learn a LOT that way... fuck it up, fix it up, fuck it up, fix it up.
Plus, Mr. Boss has every tool known to mankind, so I wasn't too worried.

I go on and get the stalls done.
Took me a little longer, because I had to adjust the way I did it, flinging the shit so far and all, but I got there.

That's when it got interesting.

We pulled the horseshoe hook offa the wall and took it into the shop, stuck it in a vise and I banged it back straight. Nailed it back to the wall and went on to the next thing.

This ended up involving about 42 tools, including a hoofpick, and took a while.

At one point, Mrs. Boss is talking about how bad Mr. Boss is gonna lose it if he sees this and I said, "Hell, just tell him you'd "like to see HIM rebuild a barn with a hoofpick, McGuyver" and let 'im chew on that... while you leave the room at a fast walk.
She cracked up and we went on.

Now, I don't wanna take 6 hours and get all technical about it (especially after using a friggin' hoofpick as part of the army of tools) but I do hafta get you "see" what I was dealing with... (See, this is why we should all have horses. Then you'd already know what I'm talking about... *grin* Plus, then the oil jackoffs could go fuck themselves and their 17 dollar a gallon frickin' GAS...)

Anyway... these door stop things are thick metal, shaped kinda like a "Z", except the middle part is straight, not slanted.
The part that goes on the wall has two elongated holes in it for the bolts.

APPARENTLY, they have them "specialized" for each side of the barn, because the one we found to replace the one that got busted had it's holes opposite of the one that broke.
The one that got busted had the higher bolt hole on one side of it and the one we found to replace it had the higher hole on the other side.

I'm pretty sure that was just to make this whole thing more "fun" for me... God is like that. Thinks He's funny and all...

What this means is that I couldn't just wrestle the busted piece offa the wall and simply put the new one on using the old holes.
Nope.
Not me.
First, I hadda pry the bent piece offa the wall.
Couldn't just use a socket wrench to get it off because it was bent and made it impossible for the wrench to get a grip til I loosened it up some.
After I got that off, I then hadda drill new holes for the bolts.

Well, I know how to stick bits in a drill and alla that happy crappy, but I wouldn't know a wood bit from a titanium bit from a cement bit and nether does she, so we grabbed a drill and the "kinda right sized" bit and away we go.
Pft.
I coulda made holes easier with a carpenter bee.
Fuckin' thing...
My guess is that the damned thing was for makin' holes in PAPER.

All the bit did was make dents, basically.
So, we got an eyehook thing... it has a round, cirular top to hook shit on and a "screw" like shaft, whatever it's called.
We got one of those, actually two of 'em, and started hole for real with the smaller one.
After we got it going, we took that one out and made the hole bigger with the bigger one.
That's where the hoofpick comes in.
We hooked it in the eyehole part and used it to twist the thing into the wood to make better holes.

We take that out and finally, after fuckin' around for an hour or so with this shit, I was able to put the stupid doorstop back on.
Naturally, we couldn't find the exact same sized bolts, so I tried using the original ones.
Stupid of me, I guess.
I shoulda known they were compromised by having been stressed.
I wound up twisting the head right offa the damned thing.
SO, we had to make yet ANOTHER frickin' hole with the two eyehook things and the hoofpick.
(See why I didn't get outta there til 3pm? Jeezus...)

Meanwhile, Eric radios me to ask if I've decided to just LIVE over there or what, was I DONE yet?
"No. Did you talk to your Boss or his son to get FUEL yet?"
"No. Havent' seen ANY of 'em since very early this morning..."
"Well lovely. I feel like making 700 trips to the damned gas station to get diesel fuel 5 gallons at a time.... *disgusted sigh* Perfect."

However...
the REASON he hadn't seen anyone was pretty fucked up.
Seems that his Boss's wife's elderly Uncle was cooking dinner the night before. He was wearing a sweater and cooking on a gas stove. He'd reached across the burners for something, caught his sweater on fire and BURNED TO DEATH ON THE FLOOR IN FRONT OF HIS WIFE, fer Christ's sake.

Well, daaaamn.

Guess goin' to the gas station ain't that bad after all, huh?
Jeezus.

I had no more thoughts about my version of a "bad day" after THAT, lem'me tell ya.
(Actually, I think what me and Mrs. Boss were dealing with was funny as hell... AFTER I got it done, that is.)

Anyway... we got the barn put back together and as she was going out to spread the shit, hoping the ground hadn't thawed enough for her to get stuck, I left, before she DID get stuck and I wound up having to pull her out with a dogteam comprised of Jack Russells or some damned thing. (She's got about 5 of the little shits...)

So the moral of the story is: If somebody has a certain way they do things, it's usually for a good reason and you should do it that way.
And...
Cook nekkid.

Peace

Posted by: Stevie at 01:54 AM

Comments

Posted by: Amy at February 22, 2006 01:28 PM (0ElmH)

Posted by: Stevie at February 22, 2006 02:15 PM (nnSOG)

Posted by: Light & Dark at February 23, 2006 02:54 PM (I58Kg)

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